Companies face an increasing need for integration of and collaboration among their information and enterprise software systems. In most current system landscapes, many components are directly connected in a one-to-one relationship with other components, with the integration capabilities hardwired into the application components and individual mappings programs. Under these conditions, collaborative sharing of information or process control is difficult if not impossible. Upgrades, changes, or extensions to an infrastructure of directly connected components are challenging and resource-intensive.
New electronic business collaboration, however, typically requires connectivity among all applications inside and outside of company boundaries. Networks such as the Internet provide opportunities for systems to communicate almost instantly with other systems or individuals. Business processes that once were restricted to intranets and their users are now moving to the Internet to become an effective composition of Web services. A Web service is a programmable, self-contained, self-describing, modular application function that can be published, discovered or invoked through an open Internet standard.
Processes such as supply chain planning, sourcing, and demand forecasting are automated across enterprises and within regions, and can be implemented across systems at only marginal communication costs. To achieve this result, components from different vendors ideally should be integrated into a consistent infrastructure. However, comprehensive system upgrades of existing enterprise software, or large-scale replacement strategies in heterogeneous system landscapes tend to be too costly or otherwise and simply unfeasible in terms of time and capital resource costs.
While technical connectivity is provided using open protocols and standards like the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and extensible markup language (XML), the challenge of mapping different business semantics remains. To capture future rounds of efficiency gains, enterprises increasingly will be required to deploy a new breed of collaborative business processes that cross enterprises or functions within an enterprise. In addition, enterprises will increasingly need to process real-time scenarios instead of performing batch processing. These collaborative processes will have significantly more sophisticated integration requirements than traditional processes.